A Review of Spatial Sound for Virtual Environments and Games with Graphics Processing Units

The generation of spatial audio and audio processing in general using traditional software-based methods and techniques is computationally prohibitive thereby limiting the number of, and type of auditory effects that can be incorpo- rated into applications. In contrast to consumer-grade audio cards, the graphics processing units (GPUs) of video cards have moved away from the traditional fixed-function 3D graphics pipeline towards a flexible general-purpose computa- tional engine that can currently implement many parallel algorithms directly using the graphics hardware resulting in tre- mendous computational speed-ups. Various spatial audio applications are well suited for GPU-based processing providing developers of virtual environments and games with the possibility of incorporating real-time, spatial audio into their simu- lations. This paper presents an overview of the research efforts that have utilized the GPU for the implementation of spa- tial sound for virtual environments and games. Approaches to GPU-based spatial sound are summarized and their advan- tages and disadvantages are presented.